When not establishing museums, serving on boards, and traveling the world to look at architecture, Julia Reyes Taubman has been taking pictures. Lots of them. And they are not the images you’d expect from a social powerhouse like her.

Over the past six years, Taubman has made more than 30,000 photographs, with her lens trained on her adopted city of Detroit—not on Grosse Pointe, but on the rough-edged Motor City itself. And although she didn’t intend to create a book when she started, the results of her obsession with documenting the city in all its faded glory have now been collected in a substantial, exquisitely produced volume, Detroit: 138 Square Miles (MoCAD). A party Tuesday night at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, cohosted by Jane Rosenthal, Arthur Altschul, Allison Sarofim, and Dennis Friedman of Barneys New York, will get the buzz started for the book, which will be available early next year and features an introduction by novelist Elmore Leonard, a friend of Taubman’s.

Raised mostly in Washington, D.C., the 44-year-old Taubman moved to Detroit nine years ago when she married local real estate magnate Robert Taubman—and she promptly fell in love with the place. “It’s the most important city, architecturally, that I’ve ever been to,” she says, and it is one whose cultural life she has contributed to by cofounding the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit there in 2006.

Many of the pictures in her book are of ruins, and in some locations she had to have police protection as she shot. But her special talent is to look deeper than the decaying surface of her subjects. “It’s a definitive document,” observes Charles Renfro, a partner in the high-profile architectural practice Diller Scofido + Renfro. “The heft of the book is synonymous with the problems we face in our shrinking cities like Detroit, but it’s not about freezing a moment of despair: The images are poignant but not gratuitous; they are life-filled, and capture the reality that our cities are always in transition.”

Taubman agrees. “I don’t think they’re bleak at all,” she says of the grand train stations, abandoned lots, and especially the huge, now-disused automobile plants of a bygone era. And the photographs are not a plea to fix up the city so that it looks like everywhere else—it’s the differences that intrigue her. “If the book is ‘about’ anything it’s about these buildings as monuments,” Taubman says. “No one should tear these buildings down, but no one should rehabilitate them, either.”